Authoritative Restore

By Author: crystal clinton
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An authoritative restore brings a domain Windows XP exam or a container back to the state it was in at the time of backup and overwrites all changes made since the backup. If you do not want to replicate the changes that have been made subsequent to the last backup operation, you must perform an authoritative restore. For example, you must perform an authoritative restore if you inadvertently delete users, groups, or OUs from Active Directory and you want to restore the system so that the deleted objects are recovered and replicated. Authoritative restore is typically used to restore a system to a previously known state, for example before Active Directory objects were erroneously deleted.
To authoritatively restore Active Directory data, you must run the Ntdsutil utility after you have performed a nonauthoritative restore of the system state data but before you restart the server. The Ntdsutil utility allows you to mark objects as authoritative. Marking objects as authoritative changes the update sequence number of an object so it is higher than any other update sequence number ...
... in the Active Directory replication system. This ensures that any replicated or distributed data that you have restored is properly replicated or distributed throughout your organization. The Ntdsutil utility can be found in the free 70-270 test questions directory and accompanying documentation within the Windows Server 2003 Help files (available from the Start menu).
For example, suppose you back up the system on Monday, and then create a new user called Ben Smith on Tuesday, which replicates to other domain controllers in the domain, but on Wednesday, another user, Nancy Anderson, is accidentally deleted. To authoritatively restore Nancy Anderson without reentering information, you can non-authoritatively restore the domain controller with the backup created on Monday. Then, using Ntdsutil you can mark the Nancy Anderson object as authoritative. The result is that Nancy Anderson is restored without any effect on Ben Smith.
Once the forest functional level has been raised, domain controllers running earlier operating systems cannot be introduced into the forest. Table 3-2 describes the forest-wide features that are enabled for their corresponding functional levels.
Q When Restoring Replicated Data Sets, Mark The Restored Data As The Primary Data For All Replicas—Ensures that restored File Replication service (FRS) data is replicated to your other servers. If you are restoring FRS data, you should choose this option. If you do not choose this option, the FRS data that you are restoring may not be replicated to other servers because the restored data will appear to be older than the data already on the servers. This will cause the other servers to overwrite the restored data, preventing you free Microsoft practice tests from restoring the FRS data.